


Pieces of the Puzzle

by trascendenza



Category: Northern Exposure
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-03-12
Updated: 2007-03-12
Packaged: 2017-10-03 17:13:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trascendenza/pseuds/trascendenza
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>Chris had this way of dropping comments.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Pieces of the Puzzle

Chris had this way of dropping comments.

"You have a fine body," he proclaimed one day in his nonthreatening Zen-voice as he watched Joel come out of the lake. Joel laughed; he was uncomfortable when Chris didn't.

"I've always believed that you can tell a man's spirit from his hands," Chris said another time when Joel was examining his face—how _was_ he always getting lacerations on it, anyway?—and leaned into his touch just a bit. Joel quickly excused himself to wash his hands and had spent the rest of the week looking at his fingers like they held the explanation of Chris's strange behavior.

"Maybe it's time to stop stringing her along," he'd suggested, gently interrupting one of Joel's favorite tirades about the wholly unreasonable and destructive way that O'Connell related to other human beings. "I don't know what you're talking about," Joel had mumbled, going into the kitchen and dumping out the rest of his beer. He was starting to think that liquor and Chris Stevens were a very bad combination.

He also had this disconcerting habit of appearing in Joel's dreams.

The first time, he's dressed in a toga that, if it falls the wrong way, will be completely indecent. He's reading out ten commandments from the middle of the lake, and Joel isn't sure what's most disturbing: that he's dreaming in Christian imagery or that he's hoping the toga will fall off.

The second time, he can see Chris and Maggie sitting at a table. They're leaning close, talking secretively, and he pounds on the glass that's separating them because he won't have O'Connell defaming his character when he's around to stop it. But then they look over at him and start laughing and he doesn't want to know what they're talking about anymore.

The third and most recent time, Chris comes over with some wine and Pastrami sandwiches. They eat in the shower, washing their hands in the ice-cold water, and Chris says that he knows how to fix it. Suddenly, he leans far too close to Joel's face and says, "I know how to think like a shower, Joel. You just… think naked." Joel woke up just as Chris was about to—

"Geeze," he panted, swiping the sweat out of his eyes. He thought the jog into town would help him _stop_ thinking about this.

Apparently not.

"So I have the occasional homoerotic dream about one of my close male friends," he said, sitting on a fallen branch, "a perfectly normal reaction for a man who's just been—" he stumbled over the word _dumped_, "disengaged from his fiancée."

The squirrel that was sitting next to him looked skeptical.

"And what gives you the right to look so smug, you little woodland vagrant?" Joel sneered at him.

The squirrel tilted his head to the side.

Joel closed his eyes. "God, you're right. I'm talking to squirrels. You have every right to look smug."

By the time Joel reached town, the incidents were no more off his mind than when he'd started his run.

On the plus side, the squirrel had shown him a great place to find nuts.

*

Chris watched the sleeping Joel with a slight smile on his face. He planted a soft kiss on the other man's lips and let his head drop back onto the pillow.

The good doctor had been a mystery to Chris since the second they'd met. Matter of fact, he hadn't even introduced himself or asked Chris's name, saying that he'd be gone so soon that there was no point in it. Unusual, to say the least, but just the kind of unusual that he'd come to expect from Cicely.

But if there was anyone with whom he would have foreseen himself having a raucous romp in bed, well, there were about eight hundred and forty eight names that came before Joel's.

Yet here he was.

Joel's behavior begged more questions than it answered: why Chris? Why now? Was it premeditated or spur of the moment? Oh, sure, Joel had talked, but he was very good at using a lot of words and getting very little meaning across.

Chris had figured out a long time ago that Joel wasn't as simple as he appeared on the outside, so, in a way, he wasn't all that surprised that this had happened, even despite some of the more creative (and probably illegal in Alaska) things they'd done on this mattress.

But tomorrow, he'd have to ask Joel if where he was from offering to fix someone's shower was considered a come-on. He certainly hadn't intended it that way, but it had seemed so serendipitous to find Joel in the shower with a wrench when he'd come over for the express purpose of offering his assistance.

But before the words were fully out of his mouth, Joel was on him, a strange, crazed look in his eye. Pinning Chris to the wall, he'd kissed the breath right out of him. Things had progressed with a few awkward mishaps from there—tripping a few times on the way to Joel's bed, Chris making a few vain attempts to make sure that Joel was in a balanced state of mind and spirit. But once Joel's skilled hands went to work on him, sliding up under his shirt and pinning his wrists to the headboard, well, he'd come to the conclusion that the good doctor was quite capable of deciding what he did and didn't want.

He'd done just that by, as Joel had put it, "climbing Chris like a tree."

The cards life dealt were always interesting, full of color, beautiful to behold. This new one in Chris's hand didn't disconcert him or give him pause; it just enriched the whole spread.

Pulling the blanket up, he got comfortable, content to let the wave take him where it would. He and Joel were just along for the ride.

And he, for one, was very curious to see where it would go.


End file.
